For Hershey, Pa.-based Penn State Health and Pittsburgh-based Highmark Health, a lot has changed about virtual care over the past five years.
Its use spiked during the pandemic then leveled off to where it’s now practically commonplace.
“It’s just going to become healthcare,” Timothy Law, MD, chief medical officer and vice president of integrative care delivery at Highmark, Highmark Health’s payer arm, told Becker’s. “It’s going to be a subset of healthcare like, ‘Oh, were you in person or virtual?’ It’s just going to be part of the whole armamentarium of our toolkit that we use to get access to patients and help them connect them with their physicians.”
Highmark members’ use of virtual behavioral health soared by 8,000% amid COVID-19’s peak and has since come down to about 1,000% compared to prepandemic.
“That’s one of our lines of business that has really had some sticktoitiveness,” Dr. Law said. “People realized they were able to get rid of the stigma of going into a psychiatrist’s office and they could still do it at home and save time. And there wasn’t generally a big physical exam interaction between doctor and patient in that space.”
By comparison, physical healthcare virtual visits topped out around 3,500% then stabilized at less than 1,000%.
Penn State Health also experienced big increases in virtual behavioral health, as well as virtual gastroenterological care. The health system also had its peaks in use during the pandemic; now, about 12% of patients access their care virtually (Highmark Health has a 20% stake in Penn State Health).
“Like most systems, we had rapid growth in the use of telemedicine as the key way to interact with patients and providers during that time, with crazy numbers,” said Chris LaCoe, vice president of virtual health at Penn State Health. “And then, as the dust has settled over time, it’s become more normalized in the way we conduct business, with a ‘virtual first’ offering where it’s appropriate.”
Penn State Health plans to leverage its switch to an Epic EHR to offer more virtual care tools and is expanding its use of remote patient monitoring and hospital-at-home care (through a partnership with Highmark). A particularly successful area has been its virtual ICU.
“We use a product there called CLEWICU. It’s a machine-learning predictive analytics model that’s on the back end,” Mr. LaCoe said. “The outcomes have been pretty spectacular: reduction in ICU days, length of stay, fewer ventilator days, and we’ve reduced some of the mortality and morbidity.”
The health system also offers virtual-first primary care, as well as virtual nursing and virtual sitting.
“During the pandemic, we tried lots of different things, and we’ve figured out what works,” Mr. LaCoe said. “We have a robust [virtual care] offering. There’s still lots more ground to be taken, but at least we have good foundations at Penn State Health to develop that going forward.”
